Top 160 Anne Carson Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “26. Plants do not actually sleep. Nor do they lie or even bluff. They do, however, expose their genitalia.”

— Anne Carson

102. “I started to learn Greek when I was in high school, the last year of high school, by accident, because my teacher knew Greek and she offered to teach me on the lunch hour, so we did it in an informal way, and then I did it at university, and that was the main thing of my life.”

— Anne Carson

103. “A thousand questions hit my eyes from the inside.”

— Anne Carson

104. “What makes life life and not a simple story? Jagged bits moving never still, all along the wall.”

— Anne Carson

105. “Up against another human being one’s own procedures take on definition.”

— Anne Carson

106. “Existence will not stop until it gets to beauty.”

— Anne Carson

107. “Then the edge asserts itself. You are not a god. You are not that enlarged self. Indeed, you are not even a whole self, as you now see. Your new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual.”

— Anne Carson

108. “I shall wash blood with blood to get rid of the defilement –.”

— Anne Carson

109. “She stumbled then and Geryon caught her other arm, it was like a handful of autumn. He felt huge and wrong. When is it polite to let go someone’s arm after you grab it?”

— Anne Carson

110. “Desire is not simple. In Greek the act of love is a mingling and desire melts the limbs. Boundaries of body, category of thought, are confounded.”

— Anne Carson

111. “Now I think it is true to say of the road, and also of God, that it does not move. At the same time, it is everywhere. It has a language, but not one I know. It has a story, but I am in it. So are you. And to realize this is a moment of some sadness. When we are denied a story, a light goes off. I am asking you to study the dark.”

— Anne Carson

112. “Nothing is as it was before, after the screen has gone to black. Darkness lies on the soul. To use Beckett’s phrase, “what cowers behind it begins to seep through.” With her new shopping cart Hekabe, queen of Troy, will be prowling the aisled for dog biscuits.”

— Anne Carson

113. “Yellow? said Geryon. And he was thinking Yellow! Yellow! Even in dreams he doesn’t know me at all! Yellow!”

— Anne Carson

114. “He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.”

— Anne Carson

115. “You can get used to eating breakfast with a man in a fedora. You can get used to anything, my mother was in the habit of saying.”

— Anne Carson

116. “M: Is he smart I: She yes very smart sees right through me M: In my day we valued blindness rather more.”

— Anne Carson

117. “Everything depends on liking the people and trusting the people. You have to assume that whatever they do will be as good as you want the thing to be and just go ahead with that.”

— Anne Carson

118. “Your grief is as great as your splendor was: some god is weighing the one out equal to the other.”

— Anne Carson

119. “Lava bread makes you passionate.”

— Anne Carson

120. “Oral cultures and literate cultures do not think, perceive or fall in.”

— Anne Carson

121. “I am not a person who feels easy talking about blood or desire. I rarely used the word woman myself. But such things are the natural facts of what we are, I suppose we have to follow out these signs in the endless struggle against forgetting. The truth is, I lived out my adolescence mainly in default of my father’s favor. But I perceived that I could trouble him less if I had no gender.”

— Anne Carson

122. “This was when Geryon liked to plan his autobiography; in that blurred state, between awake and asleep. When too many intake values are open in the soul, like the terrestrial crust of the earth.”

— Anne Carson

123. “I don’t read reviews and I don’t know what to do with opinions, so I just lose them. They take up space, they become a process of manufacturing a persona, which I want to avoid.”

— Anne Carson

124. “Ray please I never lied to her. When need arose I may have used words that lied.”

— Anne Carson

125. “You know who I am. You know my naked power.”

— Anne Carson

126. “No one will ever make necessity not happen.”

— Anne Carson

127. “He lives in a small country of hope, which is his heart.”

— Anne Carson

128. “My mother forbad us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead, after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them.”

— Anne Carson

129. “No accident of the body can make it stop burning.”

— Anne Carson

130. “When I began to be published, people got the idea that I should ‘teach writing,’ which I have no idea how to do and don’t really believe in.”

— Anne Carson

131. “Life pulls softly inside your bindings. The pod glows – dear stench.”

— Anne Carson

132. “Are there two ways of knowing the world – a submissive and a devouring way?”

— Anne Carson

133. “Who knows what will happen if I’m alone with my grief.”

— Anne Carson

134. “Although a monster Geryon could be charming in company.”

— Anne Carson

135. “Their faces I thought were knives. The way they pointed them at me. And waited. A hunter is someone who listens. So hard to his prey it pulls the weapon. Out of his hand and impales. Itself.”

— Anne Carson

136. “In Geryon’s autobiography this page has a photograph of some red rabbit giggle tied with a white ribbon. He has titled it “Jealous of My Little Sensations.”

— Anne Carson

137. “Why does motion sadden him?”

— Anne Carson

138. “Water! Out from between two crouching masses of the world the word leapt. – – – – It was raining on his face. He forgot for a moment that he was a brokenheart then he remembered. Sick lurch downward to Geryon trapped in his own bad apple. Each morning a shock to return to the cut soul.”

— Anne Carson

139. “Would this day never end? His eye traveled to the clock at the front of the room and he fell into the pool of his favorite question.”

— Anne Carson

140. “Your separateness could kill you unless I take it from you as a sickness.”

— Anne Carson

141. “Jealousy is a dance in which everyone moves, for it is the instability of the emotional situation that preys upon a jealous lover’s mind.”

— Anne Carson

142. “I shall not walk your ways again.”

— Anne Carson

143. “After all why study the past? Because you may wish to repeat it.”

— Anne Carson

144. “How long will it feel like burning, said the child trying to be kind.”

— Anne Carson

145. “There is a moment when the water is not in one vessel nor in the other.”

— Anne Carson

146. “A paste of blue cloud untangled itself on the red sky over the harbour.”

— Anne Carson

147. “The poached egg on your plate at breakfast is not dirt. The poached egg on page 202 of the Greek lexicon in the library of the British Museum is dirt.”

— Anne Carson

148. “When is a pilgrim like a photograph? When the blend of acids and sentiment is just right.”

— Anne Carson

149. “It is the edge separating my tongue from the taste for which it longs that teaches me what an edge is.”

— Anne Carson

150. “Geryon watched the top of Herakles’ head and felt his limits returning. Nothing to say. Nothing.”

— Anne Carson